Word: conceit
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...neat packages of self-acknowledged hokum that it is difficult to resent or condescend to them. Compared to the slackness and swaggering middlebrow pretension of recent thrillers like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Last wave, they are remarkable for their stringent suspensefulness, their fundamental lack of conceit, the inventiveness of numerous details and situations, and a sharp, reverberant visceral twang...
...generation are poured into a single setting, Central Park, on a single enchanted night. The park becomes an idealized, but never sentimentalized, recreation of the brief-lived Utopias that once sprang up in Haight-Ashbury, Woodstock and the East Village. Yet Weller does not get carried away by his conceit. His characters talk like people, not platitudinous flower children, and their all too innocent dream does not last forever. Eventually the tribe must leave its forest idyl behind to confront the wintry realities of a society gripped by an irrational...
...spasmodic myth has it that writing is like prizefighting. Contemporary subscribers to the pugilistic analogy include Norman Mailer, a few markedly inferior knuckle-typers and the odd belligerent who would rather fight than think. If this macho conceit helps anyone get through the night or his work, fine. But the sport that most truly engages American writers was, is and probably will always be baseball. This anthology of 27 pieces of baseball fiction, the first such collection in 30 years, demonstrates the affinity and raises a question: Why have so many authors felt the urge to make up stories about...
...lucrative but ambivalent sort of revenge upon the military. His first novel, which has earned $1.4 million in paperback, movie, bookclub and other sales, is the nastiest assault on West Point since Benedict Arnold tried to hand over its plans to the British. Dress Gray turns upon a conceit exquisitely designed to offend the rectilinear machismo of the Military Academy. It seems that there are inverts at the Point, Truscott writes. One, a model cadet named David Hand, turns up drowned, his body naked in Lake Popolopen and showing signs, in an autopsy, of recent homosexual activity. But Hand...
Waugh's first wife ran off with a future baronet, and betrayal by women is recurrent in much of his fiction. The ladies are usually charming and never malicious but they are prime examples in Waugh' natural history of thoughtlessness. Thei egoism, stupidity, conceit and self-regard become the causes for both cruelty and comedy. In A Handful of Dust, for ex ample, Brenda Last cheats on her hus band Tony. He journeys to South Amer ica and ends as the prisoner of an illiterate jungle madman who makes Tony read Dickens aloud to him for the rest...